Typeface Design for Fedra Sans Alt
What remains when you remove everything that makes a typeface distinctive?
Fedra Sans Alt is a companion to Fedra Sans that strips out the original's distinctive quirks—the prolonged 'f', open '6', '9', 'b', and 'P', and diamond-shaped dots—in favour of more conventional, consistent letterforms. It retains the core construction: open counter forms, high x-height, and loose spacing suited to small text sizes. The family spans an extensive range of scripts, designed by a team of specialists covering Latin, Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian, Thai, and more.
More in gray
Set in Fedra Sans Alt
Insights
- The Alt version was conceived as a design experiment: systematically removing Fedra Sans's signature characters to test how much identity could survive without them.
- Each weight ships with eight numeral variants—proportional lining, old-style, tabular lining, tabular old-style, superior, inferior, circled, and circled inverted—selectable as defaults at licensing.
- Script extensions were handled by dedicated designers per script: Gayaneh Bagdasaryan and Alexei Kassian for Cyrillic, Akaki Razmadze for Georgian, Ekaluck Peanpanawate and Mint Tantisuwanna for Thai.
- The family received recognition including inclusion in '100 Best Typefaces of All Time' and awards at Granshan 2010, European Design 2009, and Excellence Merit at the HKDA Asia Awards 2009.
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